Hardly Hardy for musical Tess

There are some misbegotten musicals on which it would be kinder to turn a deafish ear and a fuzzy eye. And I fear that for all the valiant efforts of a large company and creative team this old-fashioned musical version of Tess Of The d'Urbervilles may win just such a response.

Adaptor Karen Louise Hebden has filletted Thomas Hardy's novel of sexual politics and female desperation and left the bones of a soppy, bosom-heaving melodrama. Stephen Edwards's music is sometimes faintly reminiscent of Vaughan Williams and Holst. His pop-opera score, carves a niche of bland, tinkling, winsomeness which is quite at odds with the book's anguished introspection. Even when Tess's baby dies the music maintains its jauntiness.

Only in an impassioned trio for Tess and her rival lovers does the music exchange lethargy for a passionate crescendo of voices in turmoil. And it might be best to draw a veil and a gag over Justin Flemings's excruciating lyrics. "One kiss will keep my needs at bay," sings Alasdair Harvey's dastardly Alec D'Urberville, more laughing stock than homme fatale. The numbers tend to be mind-numbing rather than revealing. "We'll live out our days with kisses and wine," hardly smacks of Hardy. I came out singing the praises of the novel to myself, for want of alternative inspiration.

The first scene is the evening's early warning system. A backcloth of pink clouds simper and change hue. Milkmaids romp around in unseemly bliss and kick up their legs to expose more knickers than talents. As Angel Clare, Robert Irons taking over from an unwell Jonathan Monks sprawls on a hillock stirring unseemly desires in the breasts of singing milkmaids.

The mood is more Cold Comfort Farm than Tess Of The d'Urbervilles. The vignettes of Tess's homeless family and her own hard labour on a brutal farm where the workers sing their hearts out are melodrama-streaked. Miss Hebden as director, neatly martials large forces. As adapator she has abandoned Hardy's initial and exciting main lines of action. She abandons Hardy's erotic scenes where Alec pesters Tess with sexual propositions and rides her off into the mist and temptation. Miss Hebden treats Alec as a skeleton in Tess's cupboard, never seen until in a cliched flashback after her wedding to Angel. Only a finale at Stonehenge, with sinister violin notes and policemen in half light, takes musical and dramatic wing.

Poppy Tierney's seductive Tess, with jet-black hair, lips generous and eyes that do plenty of dancing, remains unphased when discarded by Irons's sexually listless Angel. Indeed Miss Tierney who has a big, powerful voice, but shrill and not clearly intelligible in dramatic moments, emerges cool not murderous from the wreckage of Tess's love-life. Alasdair Harvey's Alec, however, discovers an ardent vehemence when trying to reclaim Tess. Even when reunited with Angel, against a frozen tableau of top-hatted gentleman and ladies sporting white parasols, Miss Tierney misses pathos. But then this is a hit and miss musical which is too full of misses.